By advertising in the international press after the war, asking people to send him accounts of their sexual experiences during the conflict, renowned German sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld (who features in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin writing) discovered there were transvestites in the trenches with ball gowns in their backpacks. In the archives of the Imperial War Museum, I discovered other personal diaries that detailed same sex behaviour between serving soldiers. Hirschfeld also found accounts of drug clubs, and nudist clubs in London, Paris and Berlin. Even in suburban Clapham, a teenage Noel Coward and Esmee Wynne, his companion/muse, wore “futurist pyjamas”, and swapped clothes to run riot, in drag, in the West End...
Lovely piece by Philip Hoare in The Guardian on how
'The First World War was about decadence as well as death'; "From 1914 to 1918 no fewer than 150 illegal nightclubs opened up in Soho alone. With new attitudes to gender and sex, the war might be regarded as a catalyst for positive social change"
There's rather a lot about the war in the papers today...
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" the war might be regarded as a catalyst for positive social change" - Nah, this is just wishful thinking. Soldiers home on leave did a lot of fucking, just like quentin crisp reports during second world war London, but values didn't change on jot.
ReplyDeleteThings loosened up ONLY during the length of the war because after the war ended things returned immediately to the reactionary values that sent oscar wilde to prison. Nothing really changed in british society until the 1960s.
But there was a real opening up after the War, everywhere from Weimar Berlin to the Harlem Renaissance...
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